AdWords Retiring Regular PLA Campaigns to Shopping Campaigns

Google AdWords announced today that by the end of August, regular Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaigns will be going away in favor of “Shopping” campaigns. Shopping campaigns are a way to manage PLAs, and offer more features than regular PLA campaigns alone.

Size your opportunity with Bid Simulator – To provide more actionable insight into your PLAs, we’ve been rolling out a Bid Simulator that’s now available in all Shopping campaigns. With a Bid Simulator, you can now estimate how bid changes could impact your impressions, clicks or costs.

Options to create a Shopping campaign – In the coming days, we’ll be adding some options to help you get started. You would be able to create a Shopping campaign from scratch or, for many of you, use one of your regular PLA campaigns to create similar product targets, negative keywords or promotional text.

Multiple ad groups for advanced retailers – While many of you will be happy with your Shopping campaign as is, we’ve heard from advanced retailers that they’d like to create multiple ad groups. It’s now possible to do this within a Shopping campaign.

And here’s what AdWords said did change with Shopping campaigns:

Use product groups, not product targets, to organize your campaigns: Instead of manually creating and managing product targets, your Shopping campaigns are powered entirely by your Merchant Center product data. With your product inventory at your fingertips in AdWords, you can seamlessly organize your products into product groups using any combination of product attributes. Then, bid upon each product group according to your evolving advertising goals. You’ll also find your performance data in the new “Product groups” tab and “Dimensions” tab, instead of the “Auto targets” tab.

Say goodbye to “adwords grouping” and “adwords labels” attributes: You can’t use the “adwords grouping” and “adwords labels” attributes to group your products in Shopping campaigns. If you need additional categorization beyond your product attributes, you’ll use custom labels instead (described below). Both “adwords labels” and “adwords grouping” attributes can remain in your product feed. In particular, if you’re continuing to use regular Product Listing Ads campaigns, don’t replace the “adwords labels” attribute with the custom labels attribute in your product feed. This could negatively affect your regular Product Listing Ads campaign performance. Instead, simply create new custom labels for your Shopping campaigns. This is also useful, for instance, if you use these attributes for other ad solutions, such as dynamic remarketing.

Say hello to custom labels: You’ll use the custom labels attribute when you want to use values of choosing to subdivide the products in your Shopping campaign. For example, you can create a custom label for best-selling products or on-sale items. You can create up to five custom labels for each product, numbered 0 through 4, in your Merchant Center product feed. Assign values to each custom label as you need them.

About the author

Rick Mobiers

Rick Brown is a working as a professional technical writer with Mobiers Ltd – a leading Android App Development Services. You can also easily avail Android Programmers for hire, in case you are looking forward to avail the same.